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Former President Mahama has insisted that the teacher license examination does not make sense; therefore, he will remove it if he becomes president again.
He wondered why students of the colleges of education
The National Teaching Council (NTC), an agency under the Ministry of Education 2018 introduced the Teacher Licensure Examination in 2018 aimed at licensing teachers who teach or want to teach in public pre-tertiary schools in the country.
This, according to the Ministry of Education, is in fulfillment of Section 12(4) of the Education Act, 2008 (Act 778) which states that “the program of study for pre-tertiary teachers that leads to a license to teach shall be developed in consultation with the Council.”
“I spoke about the licensure exam in 2020. We will remove the licensure exam. The students write exams throughout the period they are in school, and when they leave to work, you ask them to write another examination; it doesn’t make sense,” he said at a town hall meeting at Wenchi in the Bono Region.
Ex-President Mahama is building Ghana engagements. He met with Chiefs, religious groups and imams, students at the Alfaruq Training College, leaders, mango and vegetable Farmers, and transport and driver unions on Friday, November 17.
The Minority in Parliament had earlier called on the Ministry of Education to suspend the Teacher Licensure Examination.
In their view, the exam is not useful.
According to Deputy Ranking Member on the Education Committee, Dr. Clement Apaak, the mode of licensing was also delaying the posting of teacher trainees to schools in dire need of teachers.
He said economically, it does not make sense to train teachers, spend money on them, and then have them stay at home because they did not pass the licensure exam.
Dr. Apaak who is a member of Parliament for Builsa South constituency, was speaking in an interview on Accra-based Joy FM
Dr. Apaak suggested that the assessment of the teacher trainees can be done within the context of the structure available at the teacher training college.
“The Teacher Licensure Exam, as it is currently structured, is not useful. We say so because students train for three good years in teacher training colleges, and pass every single exam, but then they have to pass a six-hour aptitude test before they are deemed qualified to teach when we are in dire need of thousands of teachers.
“Our position in the Minority is not that exams should not be written or that teachers should not be licensed; we are saying that that can be done within the context of the structures already available at the teacher training colleges”, he stressed.
